Summer Session

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First Year Seminar

100 – Sports, Culture, and Geography (3 credit hours)

The seminar will examine the interconnectedness of sports, culture, and geography, and the influence each has on one another. There will be a worldwide focus, as the geography and culture of North America, South America, the Caribbean, Europe, Asia, and Oceania will be covered through such sports as soccer, baseball, basketball, American football, auto racing, cycling, boxing, hockey, cricket, and rugby, at both the amateur and professional level. Historical and contemporary events and trends will be addressed, and students will be expected to develop and defend arguments on different topics in both oral and written form.

First Session Course:

51887 – 9:25AM-10:40PM – TRIB A205, Friedman

100 – The Many Lives of Frankenstein: 200 Years of Monstrosity (3 credit hours)

Think you know this story? Think again. In this First-Year Seminar we will consider the many afterlives of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) from its inception as part of the ghost story writing contest proposed by Lord Byron during “the haunted summer” in Geneva of 1816, its roots in classical mythology, literature, philosophy, and science, and its many generic “afterlives” in 20th– and 21st-century film, television, and literature. We will conclude our semester with a candid look at HeLa cells research, what some refer to as “Frankenstein science,” involving an African American woman in the 1950s whose impact is still alive today. Why is “Frankenstein” as an icon perpetually trendy in the media and popular culture? How did we progress from Frankenstein the scientist to Frankenstein the creature? How do studies or re-tellings of Frankenstein intersect with issues of gender, class, race, and scientific ethics? What does our obsession with “Frankenstein” tell us about ourselves? Our culture? How does Wake Forest’s motto, Pro Humanitate, enter such a conversation? As students complete their first year at Wake Forest, they will explore what a liberal arts and sciences approach can teach them about gender, genre, and science in the many lives of Mary Shelley’s novel, its Creature, and its scientist.